Rondo Allegro

by Sherwood Smith

  “He is correct, Miss Duncannon,” Dr. Blythe said reassuringly.

  “Very well, Henry. It shall be as you say. I know it is selfish, but I am too happy to speak against you.”

  “Good. Then pray let us enter the church; that aria is nearing its end, and I must know who that singer is.”

  There came an unpleasant interval as Dr. Blythe helped him up the narrow stone staircase. They left Henry seated on a bench and passed beyond him as the remarkable voice continued to shower them with brilliant sound.

  Then there was a step nearby, breaking the spell, and the hiss of fabric as someone bent. Caro murmured in a breathless undertone, “Henry, dear, I believe that is your wife.”

  “Anna?” Henry exclaimed, then could have cut out his tongue as the singing stopped.

  Below, Anna gave a start, her nerves flaring. “Henry?”

  Dr. Blythe took Caro’s elbow. “Let us conduct Lord Northcote downstairs, and leave him with his wife.”

  With the parson’s large hand under one elbow and Caro’s small one under the other, Henry stumbled his way down as fast as he dared.

  Dr. Blythe and Caro left him in the transept. “Anna,” Henry said, hands outstretched as he fumbled deeper into the church. The urge to rip the bandage free had never been stronger. “Where are you?”

  Anna rushed to take Henry’s hand. She, too, trembled, bewildered to find him there. “Henry?” she said again.

  “That was you,” Henry exclaimed, his wits so scattered he could only repeat himself. “That was you, Anna? Come, let us sit down. That was you singing? Why did you not tell me?”

  Henry held her hands in such a tight grip she gave a little wriggle, and he loosened his grip at once. “I dare not lose you,” he said. “It’s almost like . . . no, I cannot explain it. Sayers told me when I was lying in that infernal hospital at Gib that you had sung for the sickbay, and the midshipmen were all in love with your voice—angels, genius—but I put that down to trite expressions, and homesickness. I see now that I entirely underestimated them. That was you, in Naples, was it not?”

  “I—”

  “Why not tell me? Why do you not sing, every day, at home? Anna, there are very few things in the world that would give me greater pleasure, give my entire family pleasure. Why would you hide this talent, this marvel of a talent?”

  It was time for her to grip his hands. “I promised to keep it secret.”

  “What could possibly be the reason?”

  “Because I grew up knowing that the English of good society have very strict rules. One of those is that one must never earn one’s living in a trade.” The words she had never thought to speak came quickly now. “I was in Cadiz not as a guest, but we were hired to perform before the commanders of the Combined Fleet.”

  He did not draw back in horror, but bent his head, his profile intent. “Is that how you came to Gravina’s notice?”

  “In a sense. I was a soubrette in the Company Dupree of Paris. We had to travel to Spain when our theater burned down. In Cadiz, someone in our company told the French that I was married to an English sea captain. The reasons are immaterial now, but Admiral Villeneuve himself arrested me as an English spy. I was removed from his governance on the orders of Admiral Gravina. I think he recognized that I was not a spy.”

  “Married to an English captain sailing under Nelson’s combined fleet,” Henry said, and uttered a laugh. “Collingwood thought you were a spy, too, for completely different reasons! He ordered me to keep you on board—something I am eternally grateful for now.”

  He kissed her, his lips missing her face and landing near her ear. They both breathed a laugh, his unsteady, hers breathless.

  “I so very much wanted to tell you,” she said at length. “But everything I have seen supports what I was taught. There is a divide between what is perceived as genteel society and what is not genteel.”

  He laughed again, almost giddy. “There are those who will tell you that the word genteel is not genteel. Those truly well bred would never let it pass their lips. Never mind that. I see why you did not trust me. My father and brother certainly were in agreement about the niceties and expectations of rank, and my mother probably is as well, as much as so gentle a spirit can be.”

  He shook his head. “I might have been the same, had I not compounded with men of impeccable lineage who were wafted to the top of command at far too young an age, due entirely to their interests, and not to their abilities. While some officers I trust most are sprung from humble beginnings. Which you are not. I distinctly remember that duke that Jones waved in my face.”

  “The duke is on one side, but I believe my mother’s mother was a housekeeper,” she said. “I think my mother was always ashamed of her own mother. She was so very, very adamant that I must speak well, move well, and never transgress the rules of society, or I would be forever ruined.”

  “To a great extent it is true,” he said. “Except when it isn’t. All but the worst snobs appreciate talent, in whatever form it comes. Richard Sheridan, the playwright? You might not know of him, but English society does. He’s the son of an Irish actor, but you will find him at the best houses in London. He is one of the Prince of Wales’ set, and he’s served as a Member of Parliament. Whatever else is testified about him—and there is plenty of scandal, I’m afraid—no one flings either his birth, or the fact that he started life earning his living, in his teeth.”

  “Is it not different for women?”

  “In the main, but there are exceptions for those who lead exemplary lives. As you did.”

  “I don’t know how you could know that,” she murmured as he nuzzled her neck.

  He laughed, his breath tickling her ear. “The fact that you can say that is testament enough. But Anna, I would be the worst kind of blackguard if I claimed to love music, and yet kept your great talent hidden in my house. I wanted to take you to London to hear a concert. Would you like to give a concert? My grandmother Dangeau would like nothing better than to hire a theater, and invite a select audience. She is always patronizing musicians.”

  Anna had to take a moment to breathe. Never had she expected this moment. At length she said, “I thank you. Henry, I am good, but I am not great. I sound best in small chambers such as this church. At any vast theater, my voice is lost. Moreover, I have learned that I much prefer to sing when I wish, and not because I must. I care nothing for celebrity; my pleasure is in excellence, whether I sing for myself, or for an audience.”

  “I hope you will sing for us,” he said tentatively. “Though I cannot promise you the audience you deserve, not everyone loving music equally. Colby is a capital man on the hunting field, but he would not know Catalani from a crow. But however, the Aubignys are both people of discerning taste, the Rackhams I know would get immense pleasure, and even Elstead likes music, when he can get it.”

  Henry paused, recollected where they were, and that his secretary was no doubt tired of driving his pair round and round. “We must go.”

  “Yes,” she said.

  He rose, tucked her hand under his, and as they walked out, said, “I have a capital piece of news for you. I brought Caro here myself, and she and Blythe have plighted their troth just now. It is twenty years in coming, but at all events, that is better than forty.”

  Anna expressed all the delight that he had expected she would, which brought them to their respective equipages. She climbed into the gig, choosing to forgo her call. Dr. Blythe, newly betrothed, would have enough to do, and Anna would not wait a moment longer to tell the faithful Parrette what had happened.

  She drove back at a brisk trot, and the moment she got inside, she sent Ned to find Parrette. When Parrette entered Anna’s bedroom, she took one look at Anna’s smile, her glowing cheeks and bright gaze, and clasped her hands.

  Anna told her in three sentences what had happened. Parrette, the determined, steel-willed maid, then took Anna utterly by surprise. She flung her apron over her head, sat down on the nearest footstoo
l, and wept.

  “Parrette, Parrette.” Anna dropped to her knees by her side. “What have I done? What have I said?”

  Down came the apron. “Nothing!” Black eyes snapped above her ruddy cheeks. “It is my happiness, a thing I never thought to have.” In a few words, she revealed her own secret.

  “John-Coachman?” Anna exclaimed. “Oh, but that is wonderful! Why did you not say anything before?”

  “Because more important to me was keeping my promise to your mother. Which I believe now I can say, truly, I have done.”

  Parrette’s eyes filled with tears again.

  Anna patted her work-worn hands tenderly, and said, “What will you do? Do you wish to retire as a maid and become his wife? Oh, and I owe you years and years of wages. You remember I am now wealthy! Henry had agreed that if there is ever peace with Bonaparte I can try to find Helene, and the others, and perhaps do something for them. But you must come first. Do you still desire to set up your shop?”

  Parrette wiped her eyes. “You owe me nothing. Everything I did I began for your mother, but then you became the daughter I never had. As for a shop, I have thought about it. If the dressmaker Miss Reed decides to retire, and I think she ought, as she has been behind the mode for a generation at the least, then I might buy her shop with my savings. I could take Susan with me, as she has the cleverest fingers in the house. She is wasted as an upper housemaid. But there is enough to do before that happens.” She glanced with meaning at Anna’s waist.

  Anna laughed, then hiccoughed. “Oh.” She pressed her handkerchief to her lips. “Perhaps some barley-water. . .”

  35

  Caro’s secret fear was due only in part to the expectation of her sister’s reaction, but also that she would become, in the phrase, ‘The brags of life are but a nine days wonder.’ However, her betrothal was scarcely a nine hours wonder.

  Penelope Duncannon had made herself as unpopular as the rector was popular. Everyone sincerely wished for the rector’s happiness, and if there were a few good but quietly disappointed women who had hitherto been trying their best to catch his kindly blue eye, all were united in agreeing that Miss Caroline Duncannon would make an excellent pastoral wife. In her quiet way, she was very nearly as well-thought-of as her husband-to-be.

  The news spread quickly, once Mrs. Squire Elstead got hold of it, and in spite of her funning about Hymenia’s saffron robes adorning graybeards and spinsters, the good will of the hearers caused the news to sink into acceptance by the next day.

  For those at the Manor, there was a dinner and a ball to go to, and then at last came the evening that Henry had anticipated, without telling his wife all his reasons. Two days before the physician was due to arrive to consult about his bandaged eyes, a sleet storm rose to a gale, keeping the family inside.

  After dinner, as usual, the dowager marched with alacrity to the instrument, to play with an air of triumph the Beethoven that she had mastered at last. Henry listened with keen appreciation, applauded heartily, then said, “Emily? Are you going to sing?”

  Emily had not sung for some weeks, ever since the storm that had kept her away; she had given up trying to get them into spending the evening in a more modish manner. She had also noticed that after the dowager played, though sometimes Henry joined her, and the dowager invariably asked Mary Elstead to sit down to her harp, no one had requested her to sing.

  Pleased enough by this sign of interest, she rose. “What do you wish to hear?”

  “Anything. What is your best air?”

  She brought out the sheet music to one of her Scots songs, a pretty one that she prided herself on. The dowager, still at the instrument, firmly resettled her spectacles upon her nose with a slight air of challenge. “I can play that.”

  Emily gave a faint shrug, and when the introduction was over, performed well, she thought, embellishing the chorus with extra trills.

  At the end Henry clapped, but instead of asking her for another, he said, “Anna? How about you? It seems no one has ever asked you to sing, and I think we might repair that error.”

  Anna had begun to suspect what was in his mind. In truth she felt ambivalent. But she had known that this moment was inevitable, and so it may as well be now.

  Harriet exclaimed, “Capital! You’ve been teaching Eleanor this age. It is about time we heard you.”

  The dowager added her voice. “That would give us a great deal of pleasure.”

  “Something from Mozart,” Henry said promptly.

  “Mozart!” Harriet repeated. “Ask her for something easy. Mozart is vastly difficult.”

  “Mozart,” Henry said firmly.

  The dowager began to expostulate that she had no music for Mozart adaptations of arias, but Anna thanked her, reached past her to press a chord, straightened up, and gave them ‘Dove Sono’ from Le Nozze de Figaro.

  Henry drew a breath of sheer pleasure as Anna’s voice flowed over them like molten gold. No, like the shimmer of light on water. No, angels’ celestial choirs? Faugh! All he could think of were threadbare phrases that did nothing to embrace the extraordinary beauty of her voice, much less his pride in her.

  At the end, the dowager fanned herself. “Bless me,” she said, eyes wide with amazement. “Bless me, who would have thought . . .”

  Harriet bounced up, her brown curls tumbling over one ear. “Anna! That was a trump! Why did you not tell us you could sing like that?”

  Emily sat silently, controlling her fury as she took in Henry’s smug smile. He had to have made that suggestion out of malice; she knew very well there was no comparison between her singing and that foreign creature’s. Just as well she had kept the foreign creature’s secret. He was clearly besotted.

  She forced herself to applaud, and then said rather dryly, “From now on you must lead the way, Lady Northcote. As you do in all things.”

  Anna’s sensitive ear caught the mortification that Emily tried to hide. She said seriously, “I take as much pleasure in listening as I do in performing.” That much was true, and got her gracefully past having to offer compliments on Emily’s singing that she suspected would only prompt the others to make abhorrent comparisons. Though she did not care for Emily, she acknowledged that it was no fault of hers that she had never had Maestro Paisiello in her life.

  Her words were intended as a peace-making gesture, but they fell far short of their office. Emily only heard the odious complacency of triumph.

  o0o

  Emily kept herself away from the family for the next day, as she struggled to control her emotions. She was aware that the main of her anger was aimed at Henry. Indeed, sometimes her sensations were more like hate than love.

  Even so, she was curious enough to remain at home the day the physician was expected. He had already arrived at the inn in High Street the evening before, everyone in the parish knew by now.

  At ten o’clock the hired gig was seen on the drive, brown mud splashing behind the wheels. Diggory opened the door to a stout man in a black physician’s coat and a smart physician’s bob wig.

  “Good day, good day,” said Dr. MacAdam, a cheerful man with a red face. “Lord Northcote! I apprehend you have followed my instructions?”

  “My man Perkins saw to that,” Henry said, Anna at his side. “Lions ain’t in it, as they say. Elephants!”

  “Excellent. And this is your fine family, eh? Shall we all proceed to your drawing room? I take it we will have good light. I must have light.”

  The family trailed behind as Henry and Anna walked into the drawing room after the physician. He bade Henry sit on a stool near the window, and before he touched the bandages, he asked a great many questions.

  Satisfied that the headaches were all but gone, and most of the attendant symptoms, he said, “Pray keep your eyes closed, my lord. I must watch the action of the pupils, so we will proceed with one eye at a time.”

  Henry had been feeling the loosening of the cloth around his head every night for months, followed by the rebinding by Pe
rkins’ strong hands. At first he had suffered the sensation that the bandages held the shards of his cracked skull together. Gradually that sensation had gone away, to be replaced by an increased impatience at the restriction.

  The hated bandage was lifted away at last, and Henry kept his fists tight on his knees, eyelids shut until the physician bade him open his right eye. Light glared, making his eye water. Dr. MacAdam harrumphed and muttered Latin tags interspersed with things like “Good, clear humors . . . pupil contracts nicely . . . Now, what do you see?”

  Henry squinted, fighting the impulse to open his left eye. He saw a blurry round face under a white wig floating over his head. He blinked, and the blur resolved into jowls framing a broad smile below a pair of observant gray eyes.

  He swung his head, and there Anna was, looking back at him anxiously. He smiled, and felicity bloomed in his heart to see her smile back. “I see my wife. The drawing room. A bit blurry, but better than nothing.”

  “My lord, we will try the left eye now.”

  “This one open or shut?”

  “Oh, shut the right, shut the right. We will try them together in a moment, but first we must watch the . . .” More Latin.

  Henry opened his left eye. There was the glare, in blurred bubbles of light that winked into shadow. He blinked, rubbed his eye, and blinked again. Shadows crawled nauseatingly. He thumbed the top of his eyeball. A brief spray of tiny lights corresponded with an ache.

  “Shadows,” he said.

  “Now try both.”

  Henry opened both his eyes, and turned his head slowly. Here was Anna again, a little bit clearer on one side, but the other smeared into blur. He could make out her sweet smile, and the tiny dimples in her cheeks. Her smooth brown skin, its color enhancing the warm brown of her eyes—the brown of mead, of amber, of polished wood in clear light. She looked back at him steadily, and when he met her gaze, his heart gave a fierce beat. He leaned to touch her hand. She returned his grip, a private promise: if he had been blind he knew she would have pressed his hand exactly the same. She had married a man, whether he saw everything, or nothing.